Caption: The
Crab Nebula as viewed by the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The inset
superimposes two images: an X-ray
photograph of the Crab Nebula’s
intensely energetic core, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory;
and a Hubble
Telescope photograph of the same region.

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In his argument for the “Iron Sun”,
Oliver Manuel relies on a popular theoretical concept—the
“neutron star”. Electrical theorists, on the other hand, say there
is no reason to believe that such exotic stars exist.

At the core
of the Crab Nebula pictured above is a remarkable churning
“wheel-and-axle” structure (inset) whose discovery shocked
astronomers. No conventional model of supernova remnants ever
anticipated exotic structures comparable to what is seen here.

Some things are known about the Crab Nebula, however. It is close to
certain that it is the result of a supernova observed from Earth in
1054 A.D. The inner ring of the central “motor” has a diameter of
about one light year. Intensely energetic jets stream outward from
the central light source in two directions along the axis of an
intense magnetic field. Additionally, observations over time have
shown that rings and strands of material are moving outward on the
equatorial plane at great speeds, some up to half the speed of
light.

The point of
light at the center of the image is a pulsar, so
called because it generates pulses at radio frequencies roughly 60
times a second. (Pulses can also be observed optically and in
X-rays.)

But what
cause these rapid pulses? Most astronomers today attempt to
interpret pulsars using a strange idea based entirely on
mathematical conjectures. They say that the pulsar is a tiny
spinning “neutron star”—the collapsed remains of the historic
supernova.

Neutron stars
were predicted theoretically in the 1930's to be the end result of a
supernova explosion. For many years astronomers doubted their
existence. But then, with the discovery of the first pulsar in 1967,
astronomers imagined that the pulses were due to a rapidly rotating
beam of radiation sweeping past the Earth. Having ignored all of the
things that electricity can do quite routinely, the theorists were
required to conceive a star so dense that it could rotate at the
rate of a dentists drill without flying apart. So the neutron star
received a second life. The energy of the star’s radiation, it was
supposed, came from in-falling matter from a companion star.

The
imaginative construct received no support from later observations.
In the Crab Nebula, what we now seeis not
gravitational accretion, but material accelerated away from the
central star. In fact, all of the weird and wonderful things said
about neutron stars, such as the super-condensed "neutronium" or
"quark" soup from which they are claimed to have formed, lie outside
the realm of verifiable science. They are abstractions disconnected
from nature, but required to save a paradigm that has no other force
than gravity to provide compact sources of radiation.

Oliver Manuel
and the Iron Sun advocates have taken a daring step in questioning
conventional fictions about the Sun. But unfortunately, they have
relied upon another popular fiction. They suggest that the Sun was
formed by accretion of heavy elements, chiefly iron, onto a “neutron
star” following a supernova explosion. They further claim that
energy from neutrons, supposedly repelled from its neutron star
core, accounts for the Sun's radiant energy and the source of
protons in the solar wind. The model does not explain
the acceleration of the solar wind out past the planets (a crucial
requirement according to electrical experts).

Such
speculations, resting upon the earlier flights of cosmological
fancy, beg the question as to the origin of all other stars.
Supernovae are exceedingly rare events, and there is no sound reason
to believe that neutron stars are even physically possible.

However
appealing the original logic may have been to some, the neutron star
model should have been discarded when pulsars were found with
supposed “spin” and cooling rates that required the mathematicians
to conjure ever more dense and exotic particles–like
quarks–that
have never been observed.

Critics of
the “neutron star” hypothesis say that it is a violation of common
sense to speak of matter being gravitationally compressed to the
point that the orbiting electrons in an atom are forced to join with
the protons in the nucleus to form neutrons. The nearly 2000-fold
difference in weight between the electron and the proton will ensure
charge separation in an intense gravitational field. Each atom will
become a tiny radial electric dipole that assists charge separation.
And the electric force of repulsion is 39 orders of magnitude
stronger than gravity, so extremely weak charge separation is
sufficient to resist gravitational compression. The force of gravity
is effectively zero in the presence of the electric force.

All of
today’s popular ideas about supernovae, the supposed progenitors of
neutron stars, were formulated under a gravity-only ideology that
has, in recent decades, been challenged (and electric theorists
would say overturned) by the discovery of plasma and
powerful electric and magnetic fields in space. Supernovae have
recently been
identified as catastrophic stellar electrical
discharges. The remnant of such a discharge cannot be the imagined
rapidly spinning super-dense object: powerful electrical forces will
always prevent gravitational "super-collapse."

Plasma
physicists have shown (in the words of K. Healy and A. Peratt) that
the pulsed radiation detected from some supernova remnants may
"…derive either from the pulsar’s interaction with its environment
or by energy delivered by an external circuit. …[O]ur results
support the ‘planetary magnetosphere’ view, where the extent of the
magnetosphere, not emission points on a rotating surface, determines
the pulsar emission.” These concrete results do not rest on events
merely imagined. And they dovetail with facts that are now
inescapable: electric discharges in plasma are fully capable of
generating the exotic structures of supernova remnants seen in deep
space. The "wheel and axle" form of the supernova remnant in the
Crab nebula is that of a simple Faraday electric motor. Its
structure also conforms to the stellar circuit diagram espoused by
the father of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén.

It is a pity
that the “Iron Sun” researchers are not conversant with plasma
cosmology and the Electric Sun model. They make a compelling case
against the standard solar model, and their recent findings of
electrically induced nuclear reactions on the solar surface
could open a pathway to discoveries reaching well beyond solar
science.